Spotted: Best Practices on the Move: Building Web Apps for Mobile Devices

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Best Practices on the Move: Building Web Apps for Mobile Devices

If it wasn't your priority last year or the year before, it's sure to be your priority now: bring your Web site or service to mobile devices in 2013 or suffer the consequences. Early adopters have been talking about mobile taking over since 1999 - anticipating the trend by only a decade or so. Today, mobile Web traffic is dramatically on the rise, and creating a slick mobile experience is at the top of everyone's mind. Total mobile data traffic is expected to exceed 10 exabytes per month by 2017.

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Spotted: Node Summit - The Evolution of Javascript

Node Summit: The Evolution of Javascript

Hear about the evolution of Javascript from a panel of experts who have taken it from an idea to where it stands today, and learn what is on the horizon for the little scripting language that became one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

Spotted: Node Summit - The Importance of Cross Platform

Node Summit: The Importance of Cross Platform

Joyent's Ryan Dahl, Microsoft's Gianugo Rabellino and Rackspace's Paul Querna discuss why Node.js is so important for the future of cross platform application development.

Spotted: The Web Won't Be Safe or Secure until We Break It

The Web Won't Be Safe or Secure until We Break It

Unless you've taken very particular precautions, assume every Web site you visit knows exactly who you are.

Spotted: Browser Security Case Study: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Browser Security Case Study: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

A discussion with Jeremiah Grossman, Ben Livshits, Rebecca Bace, and George Neville-Neil

Spotted: Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

In other settings, visual complexity is more aesthetic, not less. 

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Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research
I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?
We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.
In our study we investigated how users' first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:

1. Visual complexity -- how complex the visual design of a website looks 

Prototypicality -- how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites

We presented screenshots of existing websites that varied in both of these factors -- visual complexity and prototypicality -- and asked users to rate their beauty.

The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short timeframes between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.
And these two factors are interrelated: if the visual complexity of a website is high, users perceive it as less beautiful, even if the design is familiar. And if the design is unfamiliar -- i.e., the site has low prototypicality -- users judge it as uglier, even if it’s simple.

In other words, users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). That means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations.

Spotted: Web use on smartphones -- users revisit sites only 25% of the time

Characterizing web use on smartphones

Chad Tossell, Philip Kortum, Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Lin Zhong

The current paper establishes empirical patterns associated with mobile internet use on smartphones and explores user differences in these behaviors. We apply a naturalistic and longitudinal logs-based approach to collect real usage data from 24 iPhone users in the wild. These data are used to describe smartphone usage and analyze revisitation patterns of web browsers, native applications, and physical locations where phones are used. Among our findings are that web page revisitation through browsers occurred very infrequently (approximately 25% of URLs are revisited by each user), bookmarks were used sparingly, physical traversing patterns mirrored virtual (internet) traversing patterns and users systematically differed in their web use.